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Author: Joshua B. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Author: Joshua B. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Author: Kinga Posadzy
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 9176854213
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 16
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Book Description
The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of human behavior that goes beyond monetary rewards. In particular, it investigates social influences in individual’s decision making in situations that involve coordination, competition, and deciding for others. Further, it compares how monetary and social outcomes are perceived. The common theme of all studies is uncertainty. The first four essays study individual decisions that have uncertain consequences, be it due to the actions of others or chance. The last essay, in turn, uses the advances in research on decision making under uncertainty to predict behavior in riskless choices. The first essay, Fairness Versus Efficiency: How Procedural Fairness Concerns Affect Coordination, investigates whether preferences for fair rules undermine the efficiency of coordination mechanisms that put some individuals at a disadvantage. The results from a laboratory experiment show that the existence of coordination mechanisms, such as action recommendations, increases efficiency, even if one party is strongly disadvantaged by the mechanism. Further, it is demonstrated that while individuals’ behavior does not depend on the fairness of the coordination mechanism, their beliefs about people’s behavior do. The second essay, Dishonesty and Competition. Evidence from a stiff competition environment, explores whether and how the possibility to behave dishonestly affects the willingness to compete and who the winner is in a competition between similarly skilled individuals. We do not find differences in competition entry between competitions in which dishonesty is possible and in which it is not. However, we find that due to the heterogeneity in propensity to behave dishonestly, around 20% of winners are not the best-performing individuals. This implies that the efficient allocation of resources cannot be ensured in a stiff competition in which behavior is unmonitored. The third essay, Tracing Risky Decision Making for Oneself and Others: The Role of Intuition and Deliberation, explores how individuals make choices under risk for themselves and on behalf of other people. The findings demonstrate that while there are no differences in preferences for taking risks when deciding for oneself and for others, individuals have greater decision error when choosing for other individuals. The differences in the decision error can be partly attributed to the differences in information processing; individuals employ more deliberative cognitive processing when deciding for themselves than when deciding for others. Conducting more information processing when deciding for others is related to the reduction in decision error. The fourth essay, The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Surgeons’ Clinical Decision Making, investigates how mental depletion, caused by a long session of decision making, affects surgeon’s decision to operate. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that surgeons are less likely to schedule an operation for patients who have appointment late during the work shift than for patients who have appointment at the beginning of the work shift. Understanding how the quality of medical decisions depends on when the patient is seen is important for achieving both efficiency and fairness in health care, where long shifts are popular. The fifth essay, Preferences for Outcome Editing in Monetary and Social Contexts, compares whether individuals use the same rules for mental representation of monetary outcomes (e.g., purchases, expenses) as for social outcomes (e.g., having nice time with friends). Outcome editing is an operation in mental accounting that determines whether individuals prefer to first combine multiple outcomes before their evaluation (integration) or evaluate each outcome separately (segregation). I find that the majority of individuals express different preferences for outcome editing in the monetary context than in the social context. Further, while the results on the editing of monetary outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions, no existing model can explain the editing of social outcomes.
Author: David Austen-Smith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 354027295X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Social choices, about expenditures on government programs, or about public policy more broadly, or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives, are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks' research on this subject. It examines the strategic aspects of political decision-making, including the choices of voters in committees, the positioning of candidates in electoral campaigns, and the behavior of parties in legislatures. The chapters of this book contribute to the theory of voting with incomplete information, to the literature on Downsian and probabilistic voting models of elections, to the theory of social choice in distributive environments, and to the theory of optimal dynamic decision-making. The essays employ a spectrum of research methods, from game-theoretic analysis, to empirical investigation, to experimental testing.
Author: Dilan Okcuoglu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788449076749
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 91
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Book Description
Human behavior is strongly affected by social factors such as norms or social pressure, and economic decision making is not an exception. The impact of self and social image considerations is well documented in decisions ranging from contract enforcement to labor productivity. Therefore, understanding the social and moral dimensions of decisions remains an important topic in economic research. This dissertation includes different approaches, theoretical models and experimental designs, to provide insights regarding the impact of such concerns on both individual and collective choice. In the first chapter, we are interested in the micro-foundations of such concerns, and we explore it by extending the standard choice model to incorporate the social environment in decision making. We define different social environments, each with different social pressure levels a decision maker may feel while deciding. As proposed by experimental findings from different fields of research, the model assumes that individuals are more likely to comply with the norms when the social pressure is higher. We provide an axiomatization of the model and suggest a general form of utility representation. The key point of our representation is characterized by a monotone function which captures the intuition of this compromise in the following way: as social pressure increases the decision maker, if not more, cannot exhibit less concern for social image. Thus, the best option should move towards the norm. This choice data allows us to identify, although partially, the norm that applies to the decision problem at hand. The second chapter, takes the analysis of the previous one, one step further and let us reveal the norm to the full extent. We investigate the behavior of many individuals who have image concerns and have to make decisions in different social contexts. Moreover, by releasing the strict assumption on the alternative set, we provide a simple and natural measure of compromise rate. The final chapter complements the dissertation with experimental data that confirms that people are indeed take into account image considerations. Particularly, we are interested in the impact of advice on the lying behavior of the individuals. Although we don't find any evidence that advice is used to manage one's social image, it can be utilized to ease the psychological cost of dishonest behavior.
Author: David Austen-Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783540801900
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Social choices, about expenditures on government programs, or about public policy more broadly, or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives, are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks' research on this subject. It examines the strategic aspects of political decision-making, including the choices of voters in committees, the positioning of candidates in electoral campaigns, and the behavior of parties in legislatures. The chapters of this book contribute to the theory of voting with incomplete information, to the literature on Downsian and probabilistic voting models of elections, to the theory of social choice in distributive environments, and to the theory of optimal dynamic decision-making. The essays employ a spectrum of research methods, from game-theoretic analysis, to empirical investigation, to experimental testing.
Author: Santiago Ignacio Sautua
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters about decision making under uncertainty. Chapter 1: "Testing between Models of Smoking Risk Perceptions" Research in social and health psychology reports that smokers systematically underestimate the personal smoking risk. I build a model that captures potential determinants of smoking risk perceptions to investigate how smoking may cause an underestimation of the risk. The model is based on the premise that smokers have an incentive to be optimistic: because quitting may be hard, they find it reassuring to think that smoking is not so risky. Drawing upon the theoretical framework, I suggest two empirical tests of the model--one using survey data and another based on a laboratory experiment. Chapter 2: "Does Uncertainty Cause Inertia in Decision Making? An Experimental Study of the Role of Regret Aversion and Indecisiveness" Previous research has shown that in many situations there is clear inertia in individual decision making--that is, a tendency for decision makers to choose a status quo option. The status quo option may be the result of a previous choice, or may simply be the option designated as the "default." While inertia may simply reflect the fact that individuals view the status quo option as optimal, there are other factors that may explain this observed behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to thoroughly investigate two potential determinants of inertia in uncertain environments: (i) regret aversion and (ii) indecisiveness. A decision maker may experience regret when the outcome of a choice compares unfavorably to the outcome that would have occurred had she made a different choice. Alternatively, a decision maker may be indecisive among the options if she does not know the probability distributions over the relevant outcomes. I use a between-subjects design, with varying conditions, to identify the effects of regret aversion and indecisiveness on choice behavior. In each condition, participants choose between two simple real gambles, one of which is assigned to be the status quo. I find that inertia is quite large and that both mechanisms are equally important. Chapter 3: "Risk, Ambiguity, and Diversification" Attitudes toward risk influence the decision to diversify among uncertain options. Yet, because in most situations the probability distributions over outcomes are unknown, attitudes toward ambiguity may also play an important role. In a simple laboratory experiment, I investigate the effect of ambiguity on the decision to diversify. Participants have the opportunity to diversify between gambles; in one condition, all gambles are risky, whereas in the other all gambles are ambiguous. I find that diversification is more prevalent and more persistent under ambiguity than under risk. Moreover, excess diversification under ambiguity is driven by participants who stick with a status quo gamble when diversification is not feasible. This behavioral pattern cannot be accommodated by major theories of choice under ambiguity.
Author: Herbert Dawid
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319391208
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 518
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Book Description
This volume collects research papers addressing topical issues in economics and management with a particular focus on dynamic models which allow to analyze and foster the decision making of firms in dynamic complex environments. The scope of the contributions ranges from daily operational challenges firms face to strategic choices in dynamic industry environments and the analysis of optimal growth paths. The volume also highlights recent methodological developments in the areas of dynamic optimization, dynamic games and meta-heuristics, which help to improve our understanding of (optimal) decision making in a fast evolving economy.
Author: Ian H. Langford
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781843767985
Category : Contingent valuation
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This memorial collection of papers authored and co-authored by Ian Langford represents some of the most thoughtful and innovative contributions to the literature regarding the holistic analysis of environment and health risk issues. It provides important foundations for the development of a mixed methodological approach to addressing such issues. The carefully chosen papers span a number of disciplines, including statistics, environmental risk analysis, human geography and economics and represent both the diversity and analytical rigour of Ian Langford's writing.
Author: Augusto Nieto Barthaburu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumer behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 111
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Chapter I of this dissertation addresses the problem of optimally forecasting a binary variable based on a vector of covariates in the context of two different decision making environments. First we consider a single decision maker with given preferences, who has to choose between two actions on the basis of an unobserved binary outcome. Previous research has shown that traditional prediction methods, such as a logit regression estimated by maximum likelihood and combined with a cutoff, may produce suboptimal decisions in this context. We point out, however, that often a prediction is made to assist in the decisions of a whole population of individuals with heterogeneous preferences who face various (binary) decision problems which are only tied together by a common unobserved binary outcome. A typical example is a public weather forecaster who needs to predict whether it will rain tomorrow. We show that a logit or probit regression estimated by maximum likelihood may well be "socially" optimal in this context in that it will lead certain populations of decision makers to social welfare maximizing decisions even when the underlying conditional probability model is grossly misspecified. Chapter II analyzes the situation of a loan officer that makes sequential decisions on whether to grant loans or not to applicants. Before making each decision, the loan officer can observe some characteristic of the applicant, and in the case that a loan is granted, he can observe if whether it is paid back or not. On the other hand, when a loan is denied the officer cannot observe the applicant's behavior. This selection problem will have an effect on the lender's ability to learn about the population of borrowers. We find that in some cases the lender will be able to make correct decisions in the long run, but in other cases not, i.e. he can make mistakes forever. The crucial factor that determines whether full learning will occur is the nature of the information that the lender observes from the applicant before making each loan. A Network Externality arises when the satisfaction that a consumer gets from the consumption of a given good depends (usually positively) on the number of consumers that consume the same good. A common feature of markets where NE are present is the phenomenon called "tipping", which is the tendency of one of the competing goods or protocols to win a substantial share of the market. In Chapter III it is argued that for tipping to occur there must be some underlying indivisibility in the consumption space. In addition to the problems posed by externalities for existence of equilibrium, indivisibilities create discontinuous demand behavior (not merely nonconvexity). In the paper we provide sufficient conditions for existence of competitive equilibrium with NE and indivisibilities. The key conditions are a large number of consumers and dispersion in their income distribution.
Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428961674
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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